High school student’s $35 device diagnoses 5 medical conditions

A spirometer is usually an expensive diagnostic tool that is rare in the developing world, but Varma developed one for $35 and won $150,000 as one of the first place winners in the Intel Science Talent Search competition, reported Smithsonian.

In 2014 Varma was awarded a $600 research grant from John Hopkins University that she used to build the prototype of her spirometer.

Varma was also able to receive medical mentoring advice from Muhammad Ali Yousuf, a biomedical engineer at Johns Hopkins, but she built the device at home.

Varma's spirometer has three main components. First, there’s the shell, made on a 3D printer. When a person breathes into the shell, the rate of the air flow is measured by a pressure sensor as his or her breath passes through a fine, stainless steel mesh.

The sensor converts the pressure change to digital data, which is monitored by a microcontroller and transmitted through a Bluetooth connection to a mobile app that Varma created.

The app computes lung performance and illustrates it on the person’s smartphone, taking into account age, gender, weight and other factors. It’s able to diagnose five different respiratory illnesses—COPD, asthma, emphysema, chronic bronchitis and restrictive lung disease—and also has a disease management tool that allows patients to record their symptoms and test results, and track the severity of their illness, reported Smithsonian.

Varma has applied for a patent for her spirometer and according to Smithsonian, her next step is to build more so she can send them to universities and medical schools for testing.